


Jesus Wouldn't

by orphan_account



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Big Messy Spiritual Debate, But I Have Had a Crappy Week, Divine Love, M/M, Pretty Much Everybody Is Involved In This, So Y'All Getting Jesus, There's Not Really Romance, This Is So Not the Update I Promised You, all the feelings, just feelings, yep
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-02
Updated: 2014-11-02
Packaged: 2018-02-23 14:19:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,548
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2550644
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Heir of Breath, meet Jesus Christ.  You two have some things to discuss.</p>
<p>Also: beards.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Jesus Wouldn't

**Author's Note:**

> So I promised you guys a Halloween update! HahahaIT'SSONOTHAPPENING.  
> Know that I tried. Know that it led to a swift descent into madness, depression, and that thing where I punch the wall because stupidity causes physical pain.  
> The rest of the updates I had planned are also not happening, because my family is visiting.  
> Console yourself with the knowledge that it has been a shitty week and at least this way I won't pull an Andrew Hussie and kill everyone just to spite you guys.  
> Also, if this offends anyone (or everyone, probably everyone), I'm sorry. I extend to you my fervent apologies for goofing with your religion. But I'm not changing it, so please go do something else now that makes you feel calm.  
> Woo.

John is sailing on the thermals (and possibly pretending to be in command of the various noble cloudknights around him) when he sees this little brown speck.

‘Huh’ is a fairly appropriate response, all and all. The imps tend to keep to a fairly strict color scheme that makes them easy to spot. It’s not a consort, John knows, because all the consorts in his planet are orange and this guy is not orange. A Carapacian wearing some kind of cloak, maybe, like the Mayor. It’s interesting overall and John swoops down to investigate.

‘Oh my god’ is a fairly appropriate response to finding a Carapacian this tall. The cloaked figure stops and looks up as John closes in. He turns out to have a face. A human face, to be more specific. A grown-up face—this guy has a beard. No horns. John’s chest goes tight with shock.

No one survived.

It’s just the eight human kids and sure, Jane’s dad is still missing, but he (looks so much like John’s dad that even mentioning him makes John feel sick like he’s going to cry), sorry, _Jane’s_ dad doesn’t have a beard. As John dives towards the stranger, the man lowers his hood. John sees gray-blue eyes and a wide nose and it’s weird, but his skin seems to be all kinds of shades of white and brown and tan at once. Must be the weird lighting of the Medium? John instantly feels a sense of peace and relief as their eyes meet, like coming home and falling into bed after a really long, crappy day.

He has no idea what to say—he’s just found another human, a living human—but he’s calming down a little. The lines and planes that make up this dude’s face are weirdly soothing. They almost spell, unassumingly, c _alm your shit_ , and John does. His voice still comes out a little nervous.

“Um. Hi?”

“Way high,” responds the bearded man. John’s forehead wrinkles. The guy points upwards. “You were.” John blinks and the bearded man sighs and smiles.

Huh. Weird. Did the sun just get brighter and birds start to sing? Does John’s Medium even have birds? Distracted, he turns and looks.

The bearded man says, “Sorry, that was a terrible joke.”

“Uh…” Several questions come to mind. _Who are you? How did you get here? Why does your voice sound almost exactly like my dad’s, only slightly different in a way I can’t place?_

“So what’s your name?” The bearded man asks, because apparently this just how you respond to teenagers swooping out of the sky in a postapocalyptic video game nightmare. You strike up pleasant conversation and look entirely at peace with the world. John finds his feet touching down on the ground.

“John,” he says. Not that this isn’t prime pranking material right here—the trolls (Karkat) have taught him this much; when asked, always claim to be named Delilah Kerensky—but he doesn’t think he can lie to this guy? Huh. “I’m, uh, John. Egbert?”

“That’s a nice name,” the bearded man says with a wide smile and John smiles back because isn’t it? “You made a pretty nice world, John.” He looks around and smiles wider. John squints over the bearded man’s shoulder. Is that… Is that a rainbow? When did a rainbow get there? “I especially like your consorts. They’re a hoot and a half!”

“So you know about Sburb?” John feels his heart beating faster. Oh no. There isn’t _another_ session, is there? “Did your other players—“

The bearded man touches his shoulder. John breathes out, and his feet land back on the ground. His thoughts smooth out as he realizes that this is all the way it should be—that what’s done is done. That everyone has fought bravely and it will all be alright. He stares up at the bearded man and has the strangest urge to cry when almost-his-father’s voice says, “Hey, relax, John.”

“Who are you?” John asks, voice hushed. He’s getting the feeling that he might have run into something really extraordinary here.

The bearded man tells him his name.

‘Jesus Christ’ turns out to be a fairly accurate response to this.

\----

John brings Jesus back to the meteor crash site. This is a thing that happens. He’s not exactly sure _how_ it happens. He has the sense that they took a short, leisurely stroll and crossed over seventeen miles of mountainous terrain, and that maybe at the same time they flew through the sky together and Jesus had huge strips of sunlight coming out of the back of his cloak like something exploding. But they are here now, and John is inviting Jesus inside and warning him about the loose step and Jesus is chuckling and saying, “Yeah, that one is such a tricky little fellow!”

John passes Jade first and her eyebrows get really, really up there when she sees that John brought a friend. “Hi, Jade,” John says, waving. He doesn’t know if this is inner light or peace or whatever, but he kind of wants to smile at everyone he’s ever met. And then give them a hug. He does this. Jade hugs him back after a moment as John informs her with a giggle, “I found Jesus.”

“What?” Jade’s tone is flat. She nudges him off. “No, seriously! John, who is—“ Jesus takes her hand. Jade looks at their hands. John looks at their hands. When he looks up, Jade’s expression has melted into one of utmost wonder.

“Hello, Jade Harley,” Jesus says gently. “You’re not alone anymore. And yes, they both loved you very much.”

And then Jade needs another hug and this time she doesn’t stop squeezing the crap out of John for a really long time.

\----

The trolls (which means Karkat) pitch a fit about it because they have their own Jegus and apparently this one is a cheap pigmentation-challenged knock-off, but John has just watched Roxy break down and cry into Jesus’s manly brohug arms after she was told it was okay and she wasn’t alone anymore. John pretty much knows trolls will end up as goofy as the human kids. The human kids are pretty much following Jesus around like a herd of god tier puppies.

For Sollux, Jesus touches his forehead and Sollux’s eyes get so big John can see them around his glasses. “The voices,” he says, and his own voice is shocked into a little kid’s. “They’re…”

Jesus just smiles at him. “Just needed a little radio adjustment, Sollux. Why would you think anything was the matter with you?”

Sollux goes around smiling the rest of the day, and John doesn’t even remotely know what Jesus shares with Terezi, but he’s never seen her smile so soft before, ever. Karkat resists to the bitter end, because he’s Karkat. There is something deeply hilarious about the tiny gray troll wrinkling his face up and growling at Jesus, who just tilts his head and grins like he’s in on the joke. John re-decides then and there that he definitely likes Jesus a whole lot.

And what Jesus ultimately comes up with is, “Someone does notice, Karkat.” Karkat’s growling intensifies and John is about ready to concede that Karkat’s rage the most vast and overpowering, because not even Jesus can put a dent in it. Jesus doesn’t try to hug Karkat or pat his head or hold his hand, just stands in front of him and says, “All that work and effort, it’s not going unseen. You’re not invisible.”

“Fuck you,” Karkat snaps. “What effort? Oh wait, you mean the one that led to the gruesome deaths of every one of our lusii, every organism that our shit planet had spawned, the products of our cancerous session—with a brief interlude where I actually _failed_ to murder the majority of my team through personal failures? Because that one sure lasted!” He goes on, but the words get funny—all John can hear is snarling. Maybe Karkat has switched to Alternian? But… how come the words physically hurt? It’s like each one of them is a nail getting hammered in, and John doesn’t think they’re aimed anywhere near him.

Or near Jesus.

Karkat just keeps firing them off, all these words shaped like oozing wounds, and Jesus watches him do it. And John is thinking _no, something is very wrong here, this isn’t how Karkat sounds all the time, is it?_ He wants to run up and hug his best troll friend and try to stop the words from coming out. Jesus glances at John for a minute, and John can see that Jesus looks sad about it too. They totally have a bonding moment, which is weird because this is Jesus.

And then Jesus says, in the middle of the barrage of ouch-ouch-ouch coming out of Karkat, “I know. I hear you. I _hear_.”

Miraculously, this shuts Karkat up. Jesus stays put. Doesn’t try to comfort him, and John can tell he isn’t smiling because there aren’t any new flowers sprouting out of the stone. Karkat pants a little from all that ranting. John holds his breath.

Karkat stumbles forward, claps his arms around the divine being, and just huddles there, shoulders shaking as Jesus returns the brohug.

…This is possibly the most beautiful thing John has ever seen in his life, okay?

\----

Dirk tries to question it. “So you’re saying you’re god?”

“No,” Jesus tells him. “I’m Jesus. My dad is god.”

“But you look human,” Dirk points out. “How can the concept of divinity look human? Doesn’t that mean you have to be a product of the Game? Therefore there is no god, just Sburb fucking being confusing.”

“I dunno,” Jesus says mildly, without concern. John thinks this is maybe the best response he’s ever heard to an atheism debate. Especially when Jesus grins and everyone in the room lets out a little sigh of happiness. “Maybe it’s just all in how you see things?”

John thinks this is true, metaphorically. For him, the good parts of religion only ever seemed to come when he was walking around and _deciding_ to see god in things. You could call it a positive attitude, if that made you happy, or you could call it god. For John? It was always pretty great to believe that there was someone watching over him and caring about things. Even if that was the only way god existed—in his head—it made him feel better about all kinds of stuff.

It’s sort of like being in love, right? Just because someone maybe doesn’t love you back and nothing _happens_ doesn’t mean it’s not a worthwhile feeling. For some people.

Jesus looks at John for a moment and John jumps—because what? Jesus looks like Karkat, only bigger and scarier, he looks like something green-skinned and unbelievable, he looks like a horrorterror, like a nakodile, like air, like atoms, like void. Everything. John’s head feels like it’ll split—

And then he’s just Jesus. John is trembling, thinking that maybe there’s a point to the more literal interpretation. Maybe. John doesn’t know (he still thinks that’s a perfectly acceptable answer). Jesus gives him a wink. All in how you see things. Right.

John thinks of Karkat’s angry words and the holes they left—of seeing them do that and having Jesus look back at him, like he knew John could hear it. He thinks of how Jesus knows all of their names, but asks them first and how he knows every idiosyncrasy of the meteor, but John found him wandering around alone in the Medium.

He thinks there’s something he’s not getting, but Jesus looks away.

\----

Round two is Dave, who convinces Jesus to sit with him and “talk shop.”

“So, like, what’s the meaning of life?” Dave asks conversationally around his sandwich.

“There wouldn’t be much point spending so much time learning it if I just gave it away,” says Jesus apologetically. Dave blinks, chews, and sips apple juice. John, who is sitting with Karkat, periodically flicking peas at him, leans a little closer in anticipation.

“Is there a heaven and a hell?”

“That depends on how you define eternity,” Jesus responds. He’s shaping lightning bugs between his fingers and letting them spiral out the window. John thinks they are probably destined for great things. They all look really happy, so. “I’m not a big believer in it, myself, but you know something about that, right, Dave?”

Dave does some more chewing and them places his hands on the table to give Jesus a solemn look. “Say fuck.”

Jesus smiles. “Fuck,” he says.

Encompassed in that single word is pure, undying compassion and love for every molecule of existence, mercy, delight, and awe all at once. It is salvation.

“ _Fuck_ ,” Karkat says the normal way, wiping at his tears. John pats him on the back a little. Dave has gone back to hugging Jesus and John cannot laugh at him one bit.

\----

Round three ends up being John, even though he doesn’t mean for it to be. John is a laid-back kind of guy and not really big on stuff like philosophy or Truth with capital T. He likes Jesus, Jesus is helping everyone feel better, and John is having fun lately. His thoughts on religion are still pretty ehhh, but he doesn’t think Jesus showed up in the Game just because _John_ is having a crisis of faith.

Seriously, it’s not even a bad crisis, as far as crises go. John doesn’t hate god or think he’s not real, he just doesn’t necessary think that he’s _real_ either. John has gone from mildly faithful to a positive neutral. That shouldn’t rate divine intervention, you know?

But seriously, why is Jesus specifically here? It’s been so hectic, with everybody wanting to meet him and confirm who he is and have bits and pieces of their soul put back together… Has anybody asked?

With these thoughts in mind he almost flies straight into Jesus.

Jesus was waiting for him. John is abruptly aware of this. Not necessarily waiting for the arrival of John’s body, but for his brain to catch up, and that Jesus is waiting wherever it is that John’s brain catches up. Which is here and now.

This is kind of confusing.

“Walk with me?” Jesus asks.

They’re flying—strolling—perfectly still, because there is no distance to cross whatsoever. Jesus is smiling at everything. Everything is big enough to fit in the palm of his hand, and small enough to surround them completely like they’re not even specks on the map. “How come I can see this?” John asks. “Nobody else sees anything.”

“Everybody sees everything,” Jesus answers. “Just different parts of the everything. You don’t need to see what _they_ can see; only you need to see what _you_ see. It’s why you have eyes of your own!” He smiles widely. “Does that make sense?”

“Kind of?” Not really. John feels like it might later. When his is old enough to use barbasol outside of incendiary devices. His throat closes a little bit.

“He’s proud of you,” Jesus murmurs, wings resplendent. “He knows you’re going to succeed. He talks about you all the time.”

Something in John’s heart comes undone completely at those words. He laughs, rubbing at his eyes as tears threaten to fall. But they’re happy tears, though! Jesus’s voice just sounded a lot more like his dad’s than usual, and the pronouns were a little bit different from the ones Jesus’s lips shaped.

“But you didn’t come all the way here to tell me that, right!”

“Not really,” Jesus says peaceably, and tips his head back to watch the sky, the galaxy, the void.

“Why did you meet me first?” John asks. “You could have just appeared when we were all in one place. You could have been there _whenever_.” He knows this is true. Knows it in the way he knows that right now as they walk/fly/stand, they are encircling every planet and galaxy, just orbiting. The galaxy is Big and Small and Jesus’s enthusiasm for walking in his garden is contagious. “I feel like you were trying to make a point, but I don’t understand.”

Jesus says, “Because my dad died too.” John sees a flash—like the Game, but not. He can’t tell if the Game produced what happens, or if the Game interrupted some other system. He can’t see which came first, but he sees the struggle and sees something that makes his religious concerns kind of evaporate. Good news: not forsaken. Bad news: Dirk was right. There’s no god.

Not anymore.

“I’m sorry,” John says.

“That’s a worrying thing to say to Jesus,” Jesus replies, and this time John can tell from the tone that it’s a joke. They laugh together for a while (seconds, days) and when he’s done, wiping tears from his eyes from laughing so hard for the sake of the feeling of being able to laugh, Jesus says, “I kind of think that when the Game is beaten, all the loved ones it takes get returned.”

“Really?” John looks up just a hair too fast. His Dad—

“It’s just a feeling,” Jesus says, shrugging a shoulder. “But wow, it would be a really good joke if there was just one universe all of a sudden. And all these planets and people were resurrected together in confusion and friendship and joy. Pretty great. Don’t you think that’s how it should go?”

John grins. He thinks of his friends, both gray-skinned and not. He thinks of Karkat, who John has been pretty much pestering the shit out of since Jesus’s arrival. He’s reached the conclusion that Karkat’s words mostly _always_ look like they’re bleeding, even if John doesn’t see it. He thinks he should probably fix that, given that they’re best friends and John, when he thinks about it, wants Karkat to be happy more than anyone.

He thinks of a whole solar system of friends for everybody to make, and them growing and fighting and crying and laughing together. He thinks of coming home from school to chat with Karkat and plan who is visiting who, and how many nights they’ll be staying. John thinks that is a very, very good divine plan.

And a very, very good joke.

“You’re leaving, aren’t you?” John asks. Jesus is standing up. John is very much at peace with this. It’s like how pretty trees get in autumn, and how much you like looking at them, but when a leaf falls, you don’t start wanting to get up into its business for doing what was always the thing that needed to happen.

“Yeah,” Jesus says. “I have some stuff left to do. I mean, I could work the holy angle and say my work here is done, but—” He snaps his fingers.

There is something just really cool about Jesus snapping his fingers.

“Oh, right! Before I forget, John—“ And suddenly he’s so many people—histories—he’s _timelines_ , start to finish. _All at once_ and _all the time_. And oh holy crap, John’s head is splitting. Jesus snaps back into focus. John kind of waits for his brain to explode. This does not transpire. “—yeah, alright?” John can’t even understand what he just looked at, but…. Wow. He blinks in wonder. Jesus explains, “If that’s _me_ , you really think I have a problem with you loving a boy?”

Aw. Man.

John blushes. “Jesus knows all, huh?”

“Jesus loves you,” Jesus says, and leans down to kiss John’s forehead. “Makes it easy to see love in others.”

 

When Jesus leaves, they’re all there. Battle-hardened teenagers crowding around the mouth of the meteor in their tattered clothes, weapons on hand, squinting into the sunlight. The shadows under everyone’s eyes are lighter. Spines are straighter. Fists have uncurled. Personally, John feels like he could lift a bus one-handed.

Jesus just sort of wanders down the hill, cloak fluttering around him. He looks from left to right and they’re all holding their breath, waiting for it. Something big. It’s gonna be amazing.

He suddenly turns back around and seems a little surprised to see them there. Jesus knew they’d be seeing him off, though. He wouldn’t have walked if he was feeling sneaky.

He’s surprised about something else. About who they are.

He smiles.

The light comes pouring down, in so many colors John hears Terezi sob and Jade gasp and his heart is drumming faster and faster. Two buses, twenty, Lord English himself. Does love have a color? Yes, it damn well does. John’s cheeks are wet and he takes a breath, understands why Jesus came to find them at last. Understands why it had to be now. It’s not a crisis of faith.

He takes Karkat’s hand because he remembers what is important. Karkat’s fingers squeeze around his right from the start and don’t let go.

Once, a lifetime ago, or maybe in the future—maybe when they bring everyone back—John listened to a classmate insist “because Jesus wouldn’t.” So utterly sure of herself as she informed her peers on the correct way to stumble through life. She didn’t have it quite right though.

Because what _wouldn_ ’t Jesus do?


End file.
